Spreading the Word That Family Life Is Serious Business

Pop management guru Stephen R. Covey is now peddling advice for families.

His new tome for the home, set to hit bookstores this fall, reworks notions popularized in his best-selling “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Substitute “families” for “people” and you’ve got the new title.

The new book applies his self-help process to families so they can examine how they get along, figure out how things might be better and find ways to change.

It’s hard to argue with Covey’s formula for success, at least in his case. He has built an entrepreneurial empire, dishing out popular psychology to corporate cogs and advising top executives, including President Clinton.

Now he has set his sights on the homestead, insisting that he has the plan we’ve all been waiting for. “I know you want to prioritize your family . . . “ his foreword asserts. And for those not quite ready for the full treatment, he prescribes a lower-dose regimen to get started.

In this work, as always, Covey takes no prisoners.

He posits that family is the foundation of all that’s good. A secular sermonizer, he works up despair over the tender institution’s dire straits in a world beset by evils--marital breakups, online pornography and day care, to name a few.

He then bolsters us, his message laced with corporate mission-speak, motivational rhetoric, Golden Rule-type platitudes and queasy analogies.

He’s best at delivering poignant, often funny accounts from families grappling with everyday struggles to make things better. His own family--the Coveys have nine kids, multiple grandkids and sundry other relatives--supplies the better, and sometimes bizarre, stuff.

In one crowning moment, in a chapter extolling family rituals, Covey’s wife, Sandra, tells how their three sons once expressed aggravation over their father’s prolonged phone conversation with a business associate:

“One boy got a jar of peanut butter out of the cupboard and started spreading it on his shiny bald head. Another put a layer of red raspberry jam on top of the peanut butter, and a third boy topped it with a slice of Wonder bread.

“They built a perfectly marvelous sandwich on the top of his head, and there was nothing [Stephen] could do about it.” The prank became a ritual whenever Covey got stuck on a long-distance call.

Much of the book hangs on Covey’s claims that success in life arises from several--seven, to be exact--principles of behavior. Depending on whether self-help theories turn you on or leave you cold, you can take his notions on faith or skip to the funny parts.

Nonbelievers may find him preachy, his application of business world strategies to the family amusing, and the performance-charged notion of an effective family absurd.

For instance, he advocates that every successful family requires a mission statement.

“Creating shared vision creates deep bonding, a sense of unity in purpose, a deep, burning ‘yes!’ that is so powerful, so cohesive, so motivating that it literally pulls people together with a purpose strong enough to transcend the obstacles, the challenges of daily living, the negative scripting of the past and even the accumulated baggage of the present,” Covey postulates.

He suggests that families accessorize their lives with their own family-affirming posters and T-shirts. He sells planners and other support materials to help you get started.

And his followers are passionate.

He cites one father of four who honchoed his family through the creation of a mission statement as if he were running a corporate meeting: “ . . . We put all the words on a big flip chart and gave everyone 10 votes. They could use up to three votes per item if they wished, but they could not spend more than 10 votes in total.”

I haven’t gone in for Covey’s full-course treatment yet. But I did try one tip, which, as he promised, led to some interesting, if inconclusive, results.

At dinner, I asked the youngsters what the purpose of our family is.

The 6-year-old replied: “Mom writes stories and gazes into store windows. Dad cooks a lot. And we kids play.”

The tot then piped up: “Go to the beach.”